Last year I described C++ as bearing the cautionary label ‘Here Be Dragons.’ And yet we’re all still writing C++ because it is the best programming language for the problems we face. In turn, we need a strategy to deal with the “dragons” that reside in large C++ code bases. The Dragon Book (my old compiler textbook) taught about a collection of tools to address the complexity of compiler design, and while our challenge is somewhat different, the approach remains the same. When a mere mortal programmer ventures forth to battle the complexity of large software systems in C++, they’re going to need some really good tools to help them. At Google, we’ve been building up a platform of such tools. I will introduce the platform and toolset, and show how to use them to write fast and correct C++ code, quickly and correctly.I will also give a peek into the future of the next generation of tools we’re working on and some of the really interesting changes to C++ that are coming in the next few years to help both programmers and these tools be ever more effective.
Andrey Karpov on 13 Jun 13The Archive of Interesting Code is an (ambitious) effort on my part to research, intuit, and code up every interesting algorithm and data structure ever invented. In doing so, I hope both to learn the mathematical techniques that power these technologies and to improve my skills as a programmer. The examples on this site are in a variety of languages. I generally prefer to use C++ for algorithms, since the STL provides a great framework for expressing algorithms that work on a variety of data types. I code up most data structures in Java, both because the Collections framework allows them to be integrated in seamlessly with other applications and because automatic garbage collection simplifies some of the resource management. Every now and then I'll find an algorithm or data structure that is best represented in a different language like Haskell, in which case I'll forgo my usual language conventions.
